The modern era has eroded the myths and traditions of death. But there’s a way to create your own belief system

For the vast majority of those in the industrialized, affluent west, death was – until the recent Covid pandemic – something exotic, foreign and outside of everyday experience. This distancing from death – and our expectation that we will enjoy a long, healthy, happy and pain-free life – is, so far as I can tell, an anomaly in all of human history. The luxury of viewing death as remote and “other” seems to be unique to our particular time and place.

As recently as the 19th century, death and dead bodies were frequently encountered in everyday life. The average life expectancy in the US in 1860 was around 40 years of age, and in the first decades of the 1800s, as many as 50% of children died before they reached adulthood. Death was closely experienced and familiar: it was common to butcher one’s own animals, deadly epidemics were rampant, and it was not out of the ordinary to die from a surgery or during childbirth.